Chillon imagined him to be sighing.  He had to listen further.  ‘Soul’ had been an uttered word.  When the dishonouring and mishandling brute of a young nobleman stuttered a compliment to Carinthia on her ’faith in God’s assistance and the efficacy of prayer,’ he jumped to his legs, not to be shouting ‘Hound!’ at him.  He said, under control:  ’God’s name shall be left to the Church.  My sister need not be further troubled.  She has shown she is not persuaded by me.  Matters arranged here quickly,—­we start.  If I am asked whether I think she does wisely to run the risks in an insurrectionary country rather than remain at home exposed to the honours and amusements your lordship offers, I think so; she is acting in her best interests.  She has the choice of being abroad with me or staying here unguarded by me.  She has had her experience.  She chooses rightly.  Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she escapes.’  She thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to choose.  I am responsible for nothing but the not having stood against her most wretched marriage.  It might have been foreseen.  Out there in the war she is protected.  Here she is with—­I spare your lordship the name.’

Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia’s husband.  He withheld his reply.  The language moved him to proud hostility:  but the speaker was Carinthia’s brother.

He said to her:  ‘You won’t forget Gower and Madge?’

She gave him a smile in saying:  ’It shall be settled for a day after next week.’

The forms of courtesy were exchanged.

At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said:  ’He did send a message:  I gathered it—­without the words—­from our Uncle Griphard.  I thought him in honour bound to you—­and it suited me that I should.’

‘I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,’ said Carinthia.  ’That was my treachery to the love of my brother. .  I dream of father and mother reproaching me.’

The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind’s picture of the early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for having abandoned a sister’s duties in the quest of personal happiness.

But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind’s intelligence, wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of his terrors.  She penetrated the discrowned tyrant’s nature some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms.  These, combined with his assured high style, had woven him the magical